Johnnie Beattie accepts Scotland are "absolutely" the underdogs for the visit of Italy in the RBS Six Nations.
Both sides had contrasting starts to their campaigns last weekend with Scotland comprehensively beaten 38-18 against England and the Italians stunning France with a 23-18 victory in Rome.
But Beattie was not surprised by the Italians' display and feels their recent record makes the visitors the favourites at Murrayfield tomorrow.
Italy have won four of the last six meetings between the teams in the competition and Scotland are odds-on favourites for a second successive wooden spoon.
When asked who the underdogs were, Beattie said: "Absolutely us. We have seen the level of performance that Italy have put together over the past few years.
"They are not the team that maybe they were three, four, five years ago. They are a very, very different animal.
"We have come off the back of a disappointing performance against England, they have just beaten France, in my eyes the pre-tournament favourites.
"We are definitely the pre-match underdogs for this game."
The Montpellier number eight had not played an international for 18 months before his Twickenham outing last weekend but he was quick to take his share of the collective responsibility for Scotland's decline in recent years.
But the 27-year-old also knows he and his team-mates have the opportunity to re-assert Scotland's standing in the world game.
"We did analysis of the way we played against England and in many, many respects we were nowhere near where we wanted to be," the former Glasgow player said.
"It was very easy to see where we went wrong, and that was a positive thing, but the only people that can change that are the players.
"We have everything in our hands and everything is on us, and we are just looking forward to going out there and trying to play better."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article